Enduring love as exes seek a claim to flames

February 24, 2008 — 11.00am

There's a happily married woman in Melbourne. Every Christmas a private detective follows her around for a while, gathering evidence of her bliss. For about 10 years, the Charlie's Angels agency had the job. The client, an ex-lover, was waiting for the woman's life to fall apart so he could swoop in with the flowers and sweet talk.

"He sort of became like a friend because we knew him for so long," says Angels' director Charles Rahim. "We tried telling him there are other fish in the sea, but he didn't want to hear it."

In the end, Mr Rahim urged the client to go elsewhere. Perhaps the man should go to Japan, where there are specialist detective agencies that conspire to break up relationships for a hefty fee.

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Yamesaseya, or professional splitters, have been around for about 10 years, usually working on behalf of one of the partners who wants to be set free but doesn't have the guts to say so.

Mr Rahim's eternal-love client would also be encouraged by the launch of Ladies Secret Service, a Tokyo agency that's delving into the other side of the market: putting old flames back together. It's a costly and outrageously deceptive business, where an agent known as a fukuenya befriends the target, and patiently exploits their emotions — building up the ex-lover client as the best thing going in a cold, lonely world.

Love detectives on the Australian scene aren't quite so ardent. Says Mr Rahim: "We don't engineer the restoration of relationships … but we can provide people with the knowledge of whether it is worthwhile to make contact with the ex-partner or not."

On average, two people a week come to Charlie's Angels, wanting to track down a lost love. "It's usually because something isn't right in their present relationship or they've just broken up," says Mr Rahim. "Instead of moving on with their life, they want to backtrack. They feel they may have missed their chance. Usually we can find the old flame, but it rarely works out."

Mr Rahim has to trawl the depths of his memory for a fairytale resolution. "Years ago, a builder got me to chase up his ex-partner. He hadn't seen her for many years. We found her and she was single. … He called her up and they got back together. He actually gave me a bonus on top of my fee."

More typical is the story Mr Rahim tells of a man in his late 40s who wanted to track down his high school sweetheart. Theirs was a Romeo and Juliet storyline: broken up by the parents because of being different nationalities. "He was hoping to give the story a happy ending. I spoke with the woman and she told me she was married and content. She was agreeable for the old boyfriend to give her a call and say hello but it didn't go further than that."

Damien Delzoppo of Avenue Investigations says some people "get annoyed and sometimes abusive" when they hear an old lover is keen to make contact. "It's not that they've been hiding from the ex-boyfriend … they just see it as a bit of nuisance," he says. "They'll say, 'That was 20 years ago. I've got kids now. Why would I want to hang around with him after all these years?' One woman even made a few idle threats about calling a lawyer."

In this instance, the man, aged 47, was coming out of a failed marriage and thought the woman, his high school girlfriend, was the one he should have married in the first place. "They'd gone out from the age of 12 … for about four years. He really thought he could get back together with her … and I had to tell him she didn't even want to know about it. He was lonely, a bit upset. I sit down with these people, have a coffee and a chat. You gotta be kind."

Like Mr Rahim, Mr Delzoppo gets about two old-flame cases a week. "The majority are men. The oldest one was in his 80s. He lost his love when he went off to war: she didn't wait for him to come back. She married a year after he went overseas, had kids, did the whole family thing. He came home broken-hearted and never married. Two years ago he hired me to find her. She'd passed away 15 years before. He passed away last year."

Andrew DallaRiva of Diamond Investigations says most of his old-flame work comes from overseas. "Where a partner has moved to Australia from the UK or the US," he says. "At the moment I'm working on behalf of an English female in her 50s. She's been married and divorced, and now she's trying to get back together with a man she was with 30 years ago. I've just found that the man is in fact married and it looks like it's not going to go anywhere."

Mr DallaRiva, along with the other investigators interviewed for this story, says the first thing to establish is if their client and his lost love have a dark past. "There have been cases where males are trying to find ex-girlfriends who went into women's refuges. Obviously we don't go anywhere near a situation where an intervention order is in place."